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Yes, I can imagine that it all seems rather alien to people who are used to using the command line, and having an all omnipotent account.

Microsoft have always been criticised for producing insecure operating systems. Actually they were mostly insecure out of the box and could be hardened by changing the settings and/or installing third party software. Now they have changed their approach.

I have been running a variety of third party software since the days of Win 95 that do pretty much the same thing

I don't think our Royal Navy will be adopting it (see "Windows for Warships" thread) as I can just imagine the scenario..................

Ahahah, that is the most entertaining thing I have read here nihil in ages, and it gives me lots of ideas that were I to entertain them beyond my mind and into the real world would probably wind me up with a lot of 20mm holes in my body.

Back on topic that has to be a very annoying feature to be asked every time if you are sure about something, reminds me of the joys of being asked by w2k3 why i was rebooting or shutting down, damn annoying when you are trying to get the server shut down to get the hell out of class in a reasonable amount of time.

Well I am sure you will think me cynical here, but I suspect that this is very much a case of Microsoft "covering their six"...........

They have had a lot of criticism over the years over the "poor security" of their systems. If you look at the history, you will see that this was never an issue back in the days of DOS? computers were damn expensive back then, and generally only people who were knowlegeable and needed them spent the money. They were also unconnected, and there was no real "internet" as such.

Malware tended to spread through sharing infected media between machines. So, if anyone got infected, it was their fault for putting the infected media in the machine?

Now MS are going back along this route. "If you got infected you must have clicked yes, and you don't reboot your machine often enough to let Vista clean itself" that is your problem not ours.

The real problem is that I would suggest at least 75% of purely Windows computer users are neither computer literate nor security aware.

We just know that they are going to click "yes" don't we? and that they will always log on as administrator

Whilst I would say that Vista has greatly improved security capabilities, and certainly seems more secure "out of the box", the only way you will actually improve the overall security picture is by user education or giving them a dumb terminal

Naturally, these "improved" security features are annoying to computer professionals, but that seems to be the price you have to pay?

As for your W2K3 experience, I would say that it was quite reasonable behaviour. The majority of servers are not in a classroom environment and are not shut down that regularly? This is a Win 2000 client box, and when I tell it I want to power down it throws a popup and asks me what I want to do. Log off, shut down, restart, standby?

I just checked my Wife's Win ME box and even that asks if I want to:

Shut down
Restart
Standby
Hibernate

I believe that Win 98SE does the same but I haven't got one of those powered up at the moment.